Birthday weekend

Had a lovely birthday last Saturday! Per chance, I'd found out only a week ago there was to be a festival of sacred music in Maastricht (which is quite close to us), called Musica Sacra. The two things on Saturday that I wanted to attend were both free and quite extraordinary! The family was with me.



We saw Alain Louafi performing 'Inori' by Karlheinz Stockhausen in the morning. Inori is Japanese for prayer, evocation, adoration, and the performance consisted of ritual movements as laid down meticulously in the score by the composer. The Centre de Recherche et de Formation Musicales de Wallonie delivered the sounds, beautifully distributed over the immense factory hall of Ainsi. When we lived in Maastricht, we used to know this as Enci (Eerste Nederlandse Cement Industrie), a cement factory that took away large chunks of the landscape of the Sint Pietersberg. It's great to see these old industrial buildings being reused as buzzing cultural centres.

I was very moved by Stockhausen's score and the performance of Louafi. My husband couldn't stand watching him because of the 'artificial movements' that kept repeating to certain recurring sounds. Well, ritual movements are inherently artificial and I found the repetition in both music and movements quite trance inducing. But then again, listening with eyes closed is nice too :)



After lunch we went for the heart of the city, the relatively new Entre Deux city mall. This is an enclosed, but open-aired mall - check the picture! Imagine the impact of the beggar's voice in 'Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet', slowly pervading the space between the shops. This well known composition by Gavin Bryars was performed by ensemble Insomnio, sitting in the middle of the mall. A lonesome trombonist walking the higher shopping galleries, intermittently taking over from the beggar's voice. Powerful stuff. Nice to see some people watching and listening for a while, then just going on with their shopping - while others stood there silently and attentively for 45 minutes.

A lovely dinner with my beloved ones afterwards, what more could one wish for? Extended family on Sunday, as it should be... Great weekend all in all, thanks everyone!

Cagelist

The late Mr. John Cage celebrates this Sunday his ninety-eighth birthday. Last year or the year before, someone on the Internet — was it The Standing Room? — had the excellent idea of marking the occasion by creating a 4'33" playlist on iTunes.

I'll follow Alex Ross's example but couldn't find as many tracks as he did... Lots of Cagelists on Twitter, just use the hashtag #Cageday to find them. Fun! Please click the image below to get a better view of my list:



We went to see Else Olsen Storesund playing Cage on prepared piano yesterday which was awesome.

Form vs function - why (micro)blog?

A few interesting things I came across last week, pointing in the same direction. Someone complaining about nobody apparently missing his tweets that hadn't come through for quite some time. When nobody notices, why twitter at all?

Then someone else worrying about the nature of his own tweets, compared to the blogposts he used to write. While his former blog read as a diary -an external memory-, the chronology of tweets offered at best a fractured, incomprehensive and utterly useless list of seemingly random quotes (rephrasing and exaggerating a tad here...). Had he been wasting his time microblogging?

And then there's the 'outsourcing of memory through Google' that I wrote about in my last post. I've heard this before. When printing was invented, pessimists predicted that it would be the end of human kind as we knew it. People would become lazy and dumb because they would no longer have the need to remember or recall. Before long, they wouldn't memorise anything anymore and their brains would shrivel.


For a few years, I've used Flickr as an emotional diary. Pictures speak a lot of words, you know... I was into a few hobbies that were easy to catch in images and evoked reactions from likeminded people. We felt connected through these images, captions, tags, comments & faves.

Then I started using blogging alongside to Flickr, because some work-related stuff was more suitable for posts. Again, there was a community of people that shared information and opinions through comments, blogrolls & trackbacks.

I've stopped blogging the way I did when I started checking and doublechecking whether somebody else had already blogged about this new thing. Twitter has neatly filled this space. Anything new is on there within a minute of publication elsewhere in the world. It's kind of an express RSS-feed, a digital marquee. And I don't feel the need to be the first to announce the news anymore so I'm more a consumer than a producer on Twitter :). Moreover, tweets are disposable. If I want to keep a link someone tweeted, I keep it somewhere else - not by retweeting it. I never look back.

Like everybody else, I started using Facebook as well. Now here I am a true prosumer. Facebook has gradually become the emotional diary of choice for me, with things like Flickr, YouTube, blogposts, events & links coming together. And here I DO look back, my notes, links and embedded clips neatly stored chronologically. Everybody has their own 'blog' on Facebook and the 'home' setting acts like an RSS-reader of sorts.

I don't really care if I miss anything. Important issues will inevitably come to me sooner or later. My contacts are my filter on the world. Their interests and daily doings are reflected on my screen. We are connected in many ways. Even with the ones I know IRL, there's an extra connectiveness.

And then I felt the urge to start blogging again. I needed my own emotional diary again. If I don't blog for a week, nobody will notice and that doesn't bother me. I'm still visible elsewhere. This is MY space.

picture: British Library, London

Preciousness

"It's hard not to develop an aural antsiness when YouTube is there for the flighty browsing, iPods for the impatient shuffling. Meanwhile, Spotify and every other streaming service allows us to take for granted a song being there for our ears when we demand it. In short, our restless listening might mean we're in danger of becoming careless listeners, too.

(...) Perhaps we need just a bit more reverence when it comes to listening.

(...) Over the last few years, theatre in this country has realised the heightened awareness that odd venues and small-scale performance instill in audiences." (Hermione Hoby for The Observer)

Hoby thinks 'precious' is a word in need of rescuing, whether it's about music, theatre or any other art. In a time where everything that can be reproduced digitally seems to be there for the taking, anytime and anywhere, she might just be right.

In the same issue of The Observer, Geoff Dyer (writer) claims that 'Googling has drained some of the purpose from his life'. No less.

"Then there's the outsourcing of memory. From the age of 16, I got into the habit of memorising passages of poetry and compiling detailed indexes in the back of books of prose. So if there was a passage I couldn't remember, I would spend hours going through my books, seeking it out. Now, in what TS Eliot, with great prescience, called 'this twittering world', I just google the key phrase of the half-remembered quote. Which is great, but it's drained some of the purpose from my life."

But there's relief too, from Colin Blakemore (neurobiologist):

"It's curious that some of the most vociferous critics of the internet are the very sorts of people who are benefiting most from this wonderful, liberating, organic extension of the human mind. They are academics, scientists, scholars and writers, who fear that the extraordinary technology that they use every day is a danger to the unsophisticated.

They underestimate the capacity of the human brain to capitalise on new ways of storing and transmitting information. When I was at school I learned by heart great swathes of poetry and chunks of the Bible, not to mention page after page of scientific textbooks. What a waste of my neurons, all clogged up with knowledge that I can now obtain with the click of a mouse."

Related issues in my opinion. When everything is available at a mouseclick, you can either consume what's right before you until you drown in middle-of-the-road entertainment or use the advantage of unlimited choice (the far end of the long tail) and sophisticated filtering to find hidden gems. To uncover preciousness. Yes, this can be as time consuming as going through your bookcase to find a certain line of prose used to be.
Who's with me?

I Drink The Air Before Me

"I Drink the Air Before Me is an evening-length score for Stephen Petronio's dance piece bearing the same name. Inasmuch as it was celebrating Stephen's company's 25th anniversary, the piece wanted to be big, ecstatic, and celebratory. Our initial meeting, in which we discussed the structure of the work, yielded a sketch: a giant line, starting at the lower left hand side of a napkin, and ending in the upper right. Start small, get big!"

Awesome music, please do have a listen! Check out pre-ordering possibilities on Nico's Bedroom Community website.

If you liked this...

Yes, I know I wrote about my dislike of recommendations when it comes to my own personal taste (especially music but in reading as well). I do think that this has got to be part of the future for libraries, public and educational alike.

The world is a social place and online strategies do seem to work. There's something quite touching about seeing a book with a customer's review attached to it. A good bookstore (or library) should also leave the bad reviews on, if they're well articulated. This particular store offers only good reviews...

I know I would love to leave a tweet-length review on some cd's, if the opportunity is provided. Borders offers it throughout their stores in the shape of blank notes that wrap neatly around a book cover of your choice. Show & share your likes and dislikes! To read the reviews on the books, go to the original picture.

Now think again

"God's thumb"?

What was I thinking? That everyone would know what I was talking about?
Google doesn't know, apparently...

But how poetical does 'jugular notch' or 'suprasternal notch' sound to you?
I'm pretty sure I didn't invent this. Look at it: God the Sculptor put his thumb there for the finishing touch - to entice us.